Galleries: Deborah Butterfield, Margaret Fitzgerald

"Piney" (2010) unique bronze by Deborah Butterfield. (Detail of the original work.)

"Piney" (2010) unique bronze by Deborah Butterfield. (Detail of the original work.)

Photo: Unknown

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"Inhabit" (2012) oil on canvas by Margaret Fitzgerald. (Detail of the original work.)

"Inhabit" (2012) oil on canvas by Margaret Fitzgerald. (Detail of the original work.)

Photo: Margaret Fitzgerald

Galleries: Deborah Butterfield, Margaret Fitzgerald

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To my relief, I finally saw what I consider a failed work by Montana sculptor Deborah Butterfield. But it was at an art fair in New York, not in her current exhibition at Anglim.

Nobody hits the target every time, but Butterfield has worked with unnervingly brilliant consistency for so long as to make me wonder whether I could even recognize a dud, were she to let one out of her studio. Finally seeing one has only left me more in awe of what she typically does.

People who pay little attention to detail may see Butterfield as repeating herself. For decades, she has dwelled on a single subject: horses.

She raises them and rides daily, observing them throughout their lives.

We see the fruit of this obsession - if that's the word - in a mature work such as "Piney" (2012). Here, as in two other life-size pieces and several smaller ones, Butterfield appears to have composed the veined effigy of a horse from deadwood.

The reality is even more remarkable: Working with an expert foundry, she has cast every deadwood element in bronze for final assembly into the sculpture we see.

As unique bronzes, each sculpture, and each component of every one, is a feat of casting, chasing and patina. Only touch truly convinces a viewer that the "wood" is bronze.

Several streams of modern art converge in Butterfield's work: casting, additive construction, found objects and a sustained critique of the statuary conception of sculpture.

In true modernist fashion, Butterfield refuses to let us have imagery without also seeing its construction, simultaneously or through a flickering change in aspect.

In "Piney" she returns to something she did in work of the late '70s, when she made small horse figures out of sticks and mud. In some of those pieces, vertical sticks would shore up a standing figure and serve to suggest a view through saplings or tall reeds.

Pine branches, with bits of cone attached, rise alongside "Piney," tilting into and out of its figural structure. Here the slender buttresses move the work toward abstraction rather than anecdote.

Close study of Butterfield's work reveals how far her materials and composition go beyond literal equine reference points.

The essence of Butterfield's art shows in her avoidance of the obvious in construction. A long stick defining a leg or a curved one the arch of a neck may seem like something anyone might have chosen. But to delve into the details, the intuitive decisions by which she defines an animal's stance and expressiveness, is to experience a sort of astonishment scarcely available elsewhere in contemporary art.

Fitzgerald in the rough: New Mexico painter Margaret Fitzgerald works with a fine disregard for the refinements possible to her art form.

Her paintings at Chandler Fine Art, such as "Inhabit" (2013), come scarred with tool marks and jumbled with shapes and layered colors as if they result from stints of work in dramatically inconsistent moods.

The big shapes in Fitzgerald's canvases, some hinting at rudimentary imagery, encourage viewing at a distance. But much worth seeing occurs in areas where she has scored or scraped away the topmost paint layers to let bright underpainting wink through.

The too-clear-for-comfort reminiscence of Susan Rothenberg's work in Fitzgerald's largest picture here troubles me. But I admire her willingness to leave a canvas looking undercooked, even abandoned, rather than seek the safety of fine finish.